The volume of information being stored on computer systems has exploded in recent years. Modem corporations have become increasingly dependent on the accuracy of data stored in computers for running their day-to-day operations. Computer data and computer processing is no longer contained to a single geographic site but instead may span multiple sites via high-speed network connections and distributed processing capabilities. Backup data files are created for production data (e.g., databases, files) on a regular basis. The frequency of creating backups (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) may depend on factors such as the type of data, the volatility of the data and other business requirements. For security and/or capacity reasons, backup data may be stored in a geographic location that is separate from the production application and data. After each backup job is executed, it is important that an employee, such as a system administrator, verifies that the backup job has successfully completed and created a “good” backup copy of the production data. Having a good backup file is an integral part of data recovery plans and/or disaster recovery plans that may need to be implemented by the corporation.
To perform the monitoring of backup files, system administrators typically logon to multiple machines and directories each morning to verify that databases and other files have been successfully backed up during the previous evening. This task often requires the system administrator to verify not only the existence of the files but also to check the size of the files. If a current backup file is smaller in size than the previous backup file, then this is a sign for the system administrator that the backup file should be further investigated because it may contain incomplete data. As the number of server systems, directories and files becomes more numerous, checking each file manually can become a tedious and error prone process for the system administrators.